‘Hey! What’s wrong?’

‘I—I don’t know. It’s like the things people feel seep into me.’

He laughed and I could have cried. I could just have cried for wanting to hear him laugh like that again. ‘Why are you so much like me, you crazy little fool?’

My voice came out very small. ‘Isn’t that a good thing? You’re awesome.’

‘Not necessarily in ways I’d wish for you.’

I sniffed. ‘What would you wish for me?’

‘Peace, to begin with. Sanity, if the gods feel like being kind.’ I was a teenager, of course. ‘Peace is overrated.’

‘No. It is not.’

‘I would rather be happy.’

‘When’s the last time you were happy?’

‘I’m happy right now.’

‘Are you at peace?’

Me and my shaking hands could only laugh, circumventing themselves around the words that could not be said.

‘We are not happy unless we are crying. That is our curse and our gift.’

‘Jay?’

‘Yes?’

‘Does it hurt very much?’

‘Not quite enough, dear girl. Just a little short of enough.’

I knew what he meant. It was as true of me as him; our happiness came laced with a measure of pain. It validated the feeling. It made us who we are.

I went to bed feeling a heavy weightlessness, oddly empty and full at the same time. Perhaps it was just my bones blowing hollow.

Freshman

September 2008

‘Tara, Nicole. Nicole, Tara.’

The summer before I left India was a flurry of lunches and dinners and coffees with all those acquaintances one is surprised to have accumulated over barely the fourth of a lifetime, and crinkle-nosed confusion about items on the list of things the university recommended incoming freshmen bring to the dorms with them. Why did I need a pizza cutter? Did pizza in America come as a whole, undivided round pie? And what was a chip clip? All the clips in the malls and markets I scoured seemed firmly designed for sweeps of hair and unruly bangs; when I experimentally tried snapping one around a deep-fried crisp, the entire thing just crumbled to pieces—what was the point in that, exactly?

I addressed all these queries and misgivings to an amused (inordinately, I thought) Hannah. Her comments densely populated the Facebook pages of the university I was going to attend, and she seemed to know what was what. Upon discovering that we were living one floor away from each other, it was immediately decided that, come September, my first order of business after settling into my dorm room would be to go find her. Now, she pointed to a girl unpacking a pile of boxes on the other side of the room, and introduced me to her roommate.